“The cumulative human CO2 emissions over the industrial era now amount to close to 560 billion tons. A little less than half of this anthropogenic CO2 remains in the atmosphere—certainly enough to be of grave concern as a greenhouse gas leading to climate change. The remainder is, at present, removed in roughly equal parts into the ocean and by land vegetation. Revelle and Suess (1957) wrote a prophetic view of our perturbations to the global carbon cycle: Thus human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future—a sentiment that may be especially true for ocean acidification.”

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For those who are interested, Oregon Sea Grant has a short, 3-part video interview with Dr. Richard Feeley, one of the NOAA researchers involved in the West Coast ocean acidification work, that clearly describes some of the consequences of acidification. It starts at: http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/video/flash/acidification-1.html